The end of the DLC era

The centrist Democratic Leadership Council, which fought and largely won a battle for the soul of the Democratic party in the 1990s, is on the verge of bankruptcy and is closing its doors, its founder, Al From, confirmed Monday.

The group’s decision to “suspend operations” marks the conclusion of a long slide from its peak of relevance in the Clinton era, and perhaps the beginning a battle over its legacy, as the organization’s founders and allies argue that it has been a victim of its own success – and its liberal critics are already dancing on its grave.

Story Continued Below

“A taproot of contemporary centrist ferment is no longer in business,” said Will Marshall, who co-founded the DLC and its allied think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. PPI, which Marshall still runs, spun off from the DLC in 2009 and is one of a small handful of self-styled moderate groups seeking the DLC’s mantle as the true home for moderate Democrats.

“With President Obama consciously reconstructing a winning coalition by reconnecting with the progressive center, the pragmatic ideas of PPI and other organizations are more vital than ever,” Marshall said.

The DLC’s demise is, however, is bringing no mournful elegies from the liberal groups who made its name a synonym for everything they saw as wrong with Bill Clinton’s party: what they saw as a religion of compromise, a lack of principle, and a willingness to sell out the poor and African-American voters at the party’s base.

“One of the things that’s happening right now in Democratic politics is that progressives are winning the battle for the party,” said Progressive Congress president Darcy Burner. “The corporate-focused DLC type of politics isn’t working inside the Democratic party.”

The DLC was formed in the 1980s - the debacle of the 1984 Mondale campaign was a key motivator - to wage just that kind of intra-party war against what From and his allies saw as interest-group liberals content to consign the Democratic Party to minority status. The group and its best-known chairman, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, pushed balanced budgets, free trade, tough-on-crime policies, and welfare reform – all of which alienated the base, but became a key part of Clinton’s “New Democrat” agenda and his presidential legacy.

Though it was business-friendly and often cast as a corporate tool – or, as Jesse Jackson once put it, “Democrats for the leisure class” – the DLC had at its core an idea, the seed of the international “third way” movement that produced Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other leaders on the center-left. Indeed, its financial collapse could prove, in a backhanded way, that it wasn’t just the tool of monied interests since it is shutting its doors for lack of cash.

The DLC’s raison d’etre, though, became less clear once Democratic moderates had already taken back the party. And after the Clinton years, it picked what many Democrats still see as the wrong fights.

In particular, its support for President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – which most Democrats now view as one of the most profound mistakes of a generation – proved a key break from the emerging consensus of the party, and one from which it probably never recovered. That choice echoed through DLC battles with Vermont Governor Howard Dean in 2004, and From’s support for Joe Lieberman’s independent Senate candidacy against a Democratic nominee in 2006. Many Democrats never forgave the group for its compromises during a decade during which Bush’s slim governing majority was viewed as more an accident than a cause for rethinking their basic assumptions.